Butterfly Effect - An Ultra Violet Apology - Mahloo13

Hey Brado,

That was one of the things I wanted people to realize, that when you are mixing a record you are not solely mixing it for your environment or for your monitoring system and that mix needs to translate well on everything.

Nowadays people listen more and more on earbuds, laptop speakers, portable speakers, phones, tablets etc. so it's really essential to get a balance that works on everything. How you do that? well...you listen, listen on multiple playback sources, use reference tracks etc., of course after a while experience kicks in and you basically know without crossreferencing if it sounds good everywhere. A good way to set balances (at least for me) is to monitor at really low volumes as that clearly evidentiates to me atleast what stands out and what doesn't.

As for the drums sound, I almost always add samples, even if they are really low in volume. I might add a kick sample that has more low end and one that has a nice midrange and some top and blend those with the original then buss those to an aux and eq them overall as one piece so basically I'm using the samples as EQ. The same goes for snare although I trigger just one sample which is really close tone wise to the original snare and use that to emphazise lows and highs and trigger a reverb, that way I get a clean reverb sound without all the spill. Sometimes if the drums are clean enough I'll get my samples from the actual tracks.

A lot of my sound comes from my EQ curves, I tend to boost a lot in the low end and the high end to get a really hyped EQ curve (the smiley face curve if you wish to call it that) and then compress and use another EQ to round off any edges.

The biggest secret is automation though. I use a lot of automation especially in the overheads and the toms and the room tracks. Recently I've started using parallel compression as well so during the chorus I'll unmute the paralllel compressed track for more punch...or I just duplicate the kick track for example and use the second track as a parallel track just for volume.

Sounds complicated but the secret is really in riding those faders and making everything exciting and dynamic.

Cheers!

Thank you Ed!

I also love guitar and guitar tone and I could probably spend days just recreating diferent amp tones. An amazing instrument!

There are definitely some cool tricks one can do with compressors especially if each is used for a specific purpose. Compressors are really hated on cause a lot of people missunderstood the concept behind the loudness wars and have since thought of compressors as something that's a no no when it comes to mixing. Compressing even overcompressing can yield interesting results and sonic characters. It comes down to experimentation really.

Thank you once again for the great review!

Hello Wayne!

The choice of compressors is irrelevant..as I've said many times the emulations just provide a certain vibe and allow me to get results faster as I already know what they deliver so it's easy to just reach for a certain vibe. You can pretty much get the same results with stock plugins, it's all a matter of getting to properly use attack, release and threshold controls on any given compressor.

For example to replicate this particular scenario you could ride the level of the vocals going into your stock compressor which would have a 3:1 or 2:1 ratio a slow attack and pretty fast release, while the second compressor would have a 4:1 ratio with a medium attack and a fast release and the third would be something like 2:1 for ratio and slow attack and medium release. Again you would have to listen in context and see how the compressors react from word to word and how they muffle or brighten the sound, it's all in the ears honestly.

I've always said it...it's not the gear that mixes the song...it's the engineer.

Thank you for the review!

Thank you Brado!